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While everyone is arguing about what kind of memorial should be built
on or near the World Trade Center, one has quietly appeared just paces
from the Eternal Flame in Battery Park. It is small. A little weird. And
possibly perfect.

It's a labyrinth.

You know, a kind of maze - although this is one you can't get lost in. It is
simply a circular path within a path within a path, made of
cobblestones flush with the grass. Slowly, the paths lead you to the
middle, although to get there you have to keep doubling back and
turning around, like a ball jiggling in a plastic party favor. When at last
you do reach the center, you just may get centered, too.

"It's not a puzzle, it's a contemplative walk," says Warrie Price,
president of the Battery Conservancy. The idea is to give visitors a little
journey inward in every sense of the word.

It works. Walking in circle after circle, a visitor keeps confronting West
St., Castle Clinton and the bay with the Statue of Liberty (or at least her
head peeking over the temporary New Jersey ferry terminal). In other
words, to follow the labyrinth is to gaze upon New York old and new,
natural and man-made, traumatized and triumphant.

West St. was one of the main escape routes from the Trade Center on
9/11. In the long months to follow, it served as the main corridor for
the cleanup machinery - and the remains.

Castle Clinton, meanwhile, was the Ellis Island of its day. Eight million
immigrants passed through from 1855 to 1890. It represents our
openness to the world, our diversity.

And the Statue of Liberty? 'Nuff said. Put it all together and you've got
New York.

But as dizzying a perspective as the labyrinth offers, its history is
equally evocative.

Labyrinths get their name from a mythical mazelike castle said to have
sat on the island of Crete. In the middle of this Labyrinth lived the
Minotaur - half-man, half-bull and the all-around favorite pet of King
Minos, sworn enemy of ancient Athens.

"It's a charmingly terrible story," says Donald Kagan, professor of
classics at Yale. Every nine years, the king of Athens - Aegeus - had to
send 14 youths to be sacrificed to the Minotaur or King Minos would
wreak vengeance. One year, Aegeus' son Theseus volunteered to go.

So sad was Aegeus that he sent Theseus off in a ship with black sails. "If
you come back, raise a white sail so I'll know as soon as I spot your ship
that you're safe," he told his boy.

When Theseus got to Crete, King Minos' daughter Ariadne fell for him.
Hard. She gave Theseus a sword to kill the Minotaur and a ball of thread
so he could find his way back out. (It is from Ariadne that we may get
the word for spider - arachnid.)

All would have ended happily if A) Theseus hadn't abandoned Ariadne
on an island on his way home, and B) He had remembered to put up a
white sail. Spying the black sail on his son's ship, King Aegeus leaped to
his death.

There is something very resonant about loss and leaping and a
commemorative labyrinth.

Even more resonant is the fact that in the Middle Ages, labyrinths
became popular on the floors of great cathedrals. Since it was nearly
impossible to get to Jerusalem in real life, "Following a labyrinth was a
way of going on a symbolic pilgrimage," says Diana Balmori, head of the
architecture firm that bears her name.

Moreover, she says, the twists, turns and dead ends along the way
came to represent the voyage of life itself: We may get lost, but we must
keep searching.

True, it's hard to keep all this in mind while walking a circular path near
the honking, screeching streets of Manhattan. But in this maze of tears
and wonder we tread, it is good, sometimes, to appreciate the journey.